Paper: Understanding and Designing New Server Architectures for Emerging Warehouse-Computing Environments

Authors:
Kevin Lim  
Parthasarathy Ranganathan  
Jichuan Chang  
Chandrakant Patel  
Trevor Mudge  
Steven Reinhardt

This International Symposium on Computer Architecture paper seeks to understand and design next-generation servers for emerging "warehouse-computing" environments. We make two key contributions. First, we put together a detailed evaluation infrastructure including a new benchmark suite for warehouse-computing workloads, and detailed performance, cost, and power models, to quantitatively characterize bottlenecks. Second, we study a new solution that incorporates volume non-server-class components in novel packaging solutions, with memory sharing and flash-based disk caching. Our results show that this approach has promise, with a 2X improvement on average in performance-per-dollar for our benchmark suite.